Pharmacy compounding is the art and science of preparing personalized medications for patients. Compounding creates pharmaceuticals to meet the unique needs of an individual patient when commercially available drugs do not meet those needs. For patients requiring customized medications, compounding medications are one of the few or only paths to better health.
Compounded medications are made based on a practitioner's prescription in which individual ingredients are mixed together in the exact strength and dosage form required by the patient. This method allows the compounding pharmacist to work with the patient and the treating physician to customize a medication to meet the patient's specific needs.
There are a number of different reasons why a compounding pharmacist may work with a doctor's prescription to create a customized medication. Compounding medication can be used to adjust the strength or dosage; flavor a medication to make more palatable for a child; reformulate a drug to exclude allergens; or change the form of medication for patients who have difficulty swallowing pills or capsules. Compounding pharmacists can put drugs into specially flavored liquids, topical creams, suppositories, or other dosage forms suitable for patient's unique needs. Specifically regarding creams, compounding for dermatological uses can often include the mixing of topical creams in order to meet a patient's skincare needs.
When mass-produced medications arrive to a pharmacy that performs compounding of medications, the medications are typically in their mass produced form (pills, creams, syrups, etc.) and are individually packaged. Some packaging forms, particularly tubes, take an excessive amount of time to empty for the medication to be used in later compound medications. Presently in this industry, human workers will squeeze the medication out of each individual tube into large bucket containers for storage until the medication is ready for mixing.
The compounding pharmaceutical industry has tried other solutions to quicken the emptying of tubes containing topical creams. One such process involved pulling the tube through a small slit in a paddle, followed by using a pair of pliers to squeeze the remaining contents from the cap-portion of the tube. Workers in the compounding pharmaceutical industry would repeat this process approximately 1000 times per day. This process, and other processes currently known in the art, is slow, inefficient, and tiresome.